In his CHI2008 paper called "Measuring trust in wi-fi hotspots", Tim Kindberg and colleagues investigate people's decisions to access unfamiliar Wi-Fi hotspots. To do so, they relied on a field experiment approach ('in the wild'). They wanted to test two hypotheses about the presence within the Wi-...
SK8 object
SK8 OBJECT 1.5 is a very interesting urban artifact designed by Melanie Iten and Gon Zifroni, commissioned by the city of Geneva. It's actually a mix of a bench and a skateboard bank: Why do I blog this? simply because I find that kind of project interesting and curious. Readers here know my inter...
The Globe as an entertainment platform
Two app that I like lately, for their entertaining potential: It's a bit old but I am still fascinated by this "If I dig a very deep hole, where will I end up?". It's a very basic google map app where you can choose to dig up somewhere and see where you go to arrive on the other side of the Earth: ...
Mobile Social Gaming
One of the domain I have been interested in the last few months is mobile on-line multi-player games. Having done research in pervasive/location-based games and knowing that this path was still a sort of "ubiquitous computing proximal future" for various reasons, I started exploring less advanced p...
The Simpsons' Monorail and innovation
The twelfth episode of The Simpsons' fourth season, called Marge vs. the Monorail is maybe one of my favorite episode and is definitely a great lesson in design. And this, not only in the conception of public transport, but also in terms of innovation as a whole. This episode focuses around the tow...
Street Electronic Journal
This sort of device installed here used to be called "Journal Electronique de Rue" (Street Electronic Journal) in the 80s in France. What I find intriguing here is the assumption people had for this sort of urban screen: so much confidence in them led people to employ the word "journal" for a pret...
The phone diversity issue in ubicomp
If one take cell phones as the prominent ubiquitous computing platform, an important problem is the one of the platform diversity. Greenhalgh and colleagues tackles this issue in their Ubicomp 2007 paper called "Addressing mobile phone diversity in Ubicomp experience development". Phones vary enorm...
John, saved by GPS
Technology as a life-saver? enabler? Seen in Geneva few months ago ...
"Keeping aging systems on their feet"
The inevitable aging and depletion of components of a design object is an often overlooked topic that is addressed in this IEEE Spectrum article. Some excerpts I found relevant: " At the very least, the quest for an obsolete part can escalate into an unexpected, budget-busting expense. Electronics ...
Shared mobility
Seen in Amsterdam last fall, beyond tandems. What I like here is that there is a potential to have this sort of device circling around a certain path, taking and letting people along the way, each of the participant giving a contribution to the movement. In the case above, it's not really like tha...